"It was 2 in the morning and quiet." I thought to myself. Again picturing the opening scene for the book I will never write about the technology crimes I have seen. I have a tendency to do that at 2 in the morning.

I like this time best. When most of the neighborhood is asleep and only the light from my laptop and the clicking of my keys breaks the night's darkness and silence.

It was another late night trying to solve a technical problem that had eluded those that had come before me. Sometimes when the problem is complex, a little letting my mind wander to the absurd, can actually help me look fresh at the problem facing me down from my screen. But this time, I almost had it cornered using the tried and true scientific method that has kept me in business as a tech consultant all these years. Almost being the operative word....

It all started when I got an email. An email that would start a chain of events leading to tonight.

The email said, why are you posting to our Twitter and Facebook page, something that doesn't belong there? Do I need to change the password?

At first I thought, oh they don't understand how it works, but let me check it out. You know how it goes, sometime your job as a tech is about explaining how tech works, not fixing it.

So I did check it out and they were right, someone was posting to their Twitter and Facebook! But things had gotten sloppy and lots of people had the passwords so I started asking around. And you know how it is when you ask around. No one is sayin, hey ya, that was me posting that horribly worded Tweet about something irrelevant on someone else's twitter feed.

But I did have one lead. Facebook said, it was being posted though Hootsuite. Well we may have 20 corporate twitter and Facebook pages but we only have one instance of Hootsuite.

So the first step was to start removing users from the Hootsuite application and then to ask that all outbound Twitter and Facebook posts go through my team. But it was still happening. Now mind you, these posts were not malicious, they were just badly written. No hastags, using the same words repeated. It was as if a computer was writing this content and then posting it on some of our corporate networks but not others.

So after some deep data analysis of all of the incidents, I had tracked it to our website or newsletter. Somehow posting, on our website for the newsletter, a story, was making Hootsuite send out that story to our multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. So was MyEmma the newsletter software the culprit? No, because a story that we posted to the website but didn't publish in the newsletter showed up in the Twitter and Facebook feeds. So, its just something that is happening with the website. Checked Hootsuite and No APIs are authorized besides Twitter and Facebook. So, what could be causing this?

Well that's where we are now. Time to lay it all out in very detailed technical terms and turn it over to our database specialist to see what he has to say.

So that's how this first story get's written. This is a story that we will post on our website, but not send out via the newsletter. This is a story that no one should ever see, because the website should not be using Hootsuite or any other means to send Twitter and Facebook posts to our local networks social media presences. Because this story is not meant for the newsletter, I can leave it on the website long enough to digitally retrace it's steps that led it to get posted on the local networks.

But if you do see it and want to know how the story ends, send me a tweet @BonnieAWolfe

It's night and quite again. I can't very well go around calling myself a Techtechtive but that's what I am. A person who uses the same scientific methods of the great dectives to figure out why certain technology or business problems are happening and then solve them. And late at night, when the world is alseap, whose to say, I am not my secret alter ego Chick Techtechtive?